Entering the Fray

How one sleepless night reading all about A.I. woke me up

(Author’s note: this is my first post and I have not explained what I intend to write about or what this newsletter’s purpose is. Truth is, I don’t know yet. I just had an idea this weekend and here we are. Everything else will figure itself out in due time. All I can say is that I’ll be writing something on most Mondays. Beyond that, who knows …)

I woke up Friday morning in a funk. It didn’t help that the sky was gloomy grey. I slogged through the morning routine. Fed the kids. Cleaned and clothed myself. Checked the calendar to register the pending slate of Zoom meetings. Coffee in hand, I was on the verge of heading up to my office in the attic when I caught a glimpse of the kids and my wife heading out the door. Some instinct deep inside me told me to go with them. Just take the ride. The last thing I needed was to be alone in the house.

I hadn’t slept well Thursday night. Wait a minute; that’s not true. I hadn’t SLEPT at all. At some point around bed time I clicked on a link a friend had sent about A.I. That simple click opened up a portal to the deep, dark universe I had been heretofore willfully ignoring. One article led to the next led to the next. I bounced from the Ezra Klein Show to the writings of Kelsey Piper and her colleagues over at Vox’s Future Perfect to interviews and commentary from Open Philanthropy CEO Holden Karnofsky. I read into the small hours of the night. Then I read into the morning. When I heard the birds chirping, I knew dawn was on its way. I didn’t care. Finally, around 5:30 or so I passed out, dropping the phone to the floor, until my 20 month-old son’s piercing appeal for his “mama” abruptly awakened me. It was maybe 6:30.

I wasn’t any fun on the morning drop offs. I just sat in the passenger seat and sulked. I watched my 4 year old daughter wave to her friends and run up to her principal for a morning hug. Fifteen minutes later, my mother-in-law scooped my son into her arms and disappeared into her building for what I’m sure was going to be another day full of memories. But all I could think was that, yet again, a small interconnected group of uber-educated, ultra-wealthy people are deciding everyone’s future. Mine. My wife’s. Our children’s. Everyone’s.

It’s not that I’ve been totally ignoring the chatter around A.I. for the past few months. It’s not even that I’m in the doomsday camp. I am excited about the ways A.I. can liberate humans and upend global economic trends that disfavor the have nots. It’s that even the developers and so-called experts keep calling the new A.I. advances a “black box” that no one really understands. It’s that commercial interests not the concerns of sentient beings that are driving the direction of development. But mostly, it’s the way the entire conversation around A.I. is being framed as an inevitability, as something we just need to accomodate ourselves to and hope the unregulated and unaccountable venture capitalist class—the same people who stoked a run on Silicon Valley Bank and triggered a near catastrophe three weeks ago!!—takes some precautions on humanity’s behalf.

In my reading, I came across two standard and ultimately interrelated arguments for unstoppability of the A.I. momentum. The first is that the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no way to put it back in at this point. The suggestion here is that progress is a train without brakes therefore the best we can do at this point is hope to build enough track fast enough to steer it in a direction that minimizes disaster and maximizes utility (or some such vaguely defined positivist outcome). The fact is that every major tech company is chasing OpenAI and is therefore desperate to carve out its own niche in the marketplace. Given what we have learned in recent months about the copycat syndrome that pervades Silicon Valley (see the standard 10% layoff trend), I find it hard, no impossible, to believe that this desperation to keep up with the pack won’t result in some kind of bad outcome that will implicate the rest of us. Remember, these are the same companies that could have collectively decided to stop the spread of online conspiracies leading up to the disastrous 2016 election, choke the financial infrastructure that has enabled white supremacy groups to spread their cancerous wings, protect developing brains from the havoc of social media—any number of issues that they have either had to be shamed into taking a stance on or just have left to the rest of us to sort out. And now … now we’re supposed to trust them to figure out how not to destroy humanity?

The more A.I. commentary I encountered that essentially endorsed the inevitability construct, the angrier I became. What do you mean we can’t press pause? Do we all not remember 2020? Have we forgotten that we were able to shut down the world in a matter of weeks? Yes, it took an existential public health threat to stop us in our tracks three years ago. And yes most of us still haven’t registered how serious and significant our next steps will be. But just last week Italy, one of the first countries devastated (behind China) by COVID-19 if you recall, temporarily banned Chat GPT. The upshot: governments have the power to press pause, so please, spare us all the “we can’t do anything but stand idly by while a tech cabal decides the fate of humanity.” We. Can. We just have to collectively believe that the situation demands as much, and confront our governments with the demand for corporate accountability in form of regulation and transparency. But as of the last time I checked (11:57 AM EST today ), fewer than 4,000 people (though steadily growing) had signed the Future of Life Institute’s appeal to pause AI experiments. We’re not there yet.

Which brings me to the second argument for pushing forward: we’re in a new cold war with China (but also Russia). We can’t let China beat us to artificial general intelligence because that will mean the end of freedom and civilization as we know it! This is the argument that I imagine is most likely to appeal to politicians, especially those with bigger ambitions that could be derailed if they push too hard against wealthy interests advancing the commercialization of A.I. In this regard, presenting one’s self as a China Hawk allows politicians to skirt the existential crisis that A.I. presents while still appearing to have the interests of everyday Americans at the forefront.

What’s so disturbing about the renewed cold war rhetoric is that it fails to wrestle with the one true thing we can all agree on about China: authoritarian regimes are not inclined to let the private sector let alone extremely wealthy individuals amass enough power and wealth to displace the government as the foremost authority. Which isn’t to say that a threat posed by China isn’t real and doesn’t need to be reckoned with. Just that given the already fractured state of our democracy and the threat posed by the rise of a right wing hellbent on turning back the clock, we can’t and shouldn’t just throw out the phrase “cold war” as a shield against meaningfully dialogue. Do we know China’s aims with A.I.? Are we confident that they want to enlist A.I. to take over the world? Would the oldest continuous human civilization on earth actually want to annihilate itself?

The last time the United State announced a cold war, laws like the Smith and McCarran Acts were passed. Everyone from the Attorney General to your next door neighbor started a list of alleged or suspected Communists. People who dared to challenge the order of things, who even smelled like a “fellow traveler” were effectively disappeared from society. Who knows whether we’ve learned from that ugly era of American history—given the current conservative rhetoric around DEI, I tend to think very little—or how this new cold war will be carried out. I just want us to be more thoughtful about how we weigh the moral and ethical implications of A.I. against the anxieties produced by a concern over China’s ascendance in the East. I get that we are reliant upon China for tools and resources that are critical to our economy (and hegemony). I’m just wary of the way fear-mongering can manipulate ordinary people like me into blind fealty that silences dissent and shuts down dialogue.

I know that I am not supposed to have let alone express an opinion about these matters. I’m not a tech genius, scientist, engineer, AI ethicist, billionaire, elite institution professor, graduate (or better yet dropout). I am supposed to be content to live in the world they create for me. Even as a writer and sometimes public thinker, I’m not supposed to have a viewpoint on matters of existential import. I’m supposed to stay in my (Black) lane. I’m supposed to stop myself before sharing opinions that could cost me business opportunities or, worse, reveal my naiveté. But that’s just it. I can’t be silent. I need to work out my own thinking on the matter, and so should you. I’m choosing to do so publicly so that, if nothing else, my children know their dad didn’t just lay down because the rich and powerful said so.

The reality is that I likely would have, like most people, remained silent and on the sidelines if were not for my wife. Her company’s CEO held an All Hands to discuss A.I. Then they brought in an expert to speak to everyone about what is happening. She in turn came home and talked with me about it. I, in turn, laid in bed that very night reading myself into a depressive state. A day later, Saturday, I was sitting alone at a two-year old’s birthday party sipping a non-alcoholic brew when a friend asked me what was on my mind. “A.I.,” I said. I had just read about an A.I. generated Jay Z verse that was stirring appeals for name, image and likeness (NIL) protections for artists. He sat down and sighed, “We’re all screwed.” The issue on his mind was unmanned aircraft. How do we put in regulations now to protect humanity against the threat of A.I. hijacking flight systems? I hadn’t even thought about that, I told him. We commenced to have our impromptu jam session. Did it solve anything? No. But it made me realize that this is on all of our minds; we just need an invitation to talk about it.

Saturday night and Sunday night were more of the same—lots of reading and little sleep. Now, here I am on Monday morning writing these words. I can say that I have dragged myself out of the doom hole that consumed my weekend. Some part of that is the simple reality of my life. I have here and now problems to deal with. It’s also a sunny day and, as my daughter told me while walking to school, a peaceful one at that. Which is to say that even in the midst of a human shift, life goes on. Still, I head into this week with a new sense of purpose. If nothing else, I’m convinced that this is a fight worth engaging in. Every organization should be hosting all-staff conversations on A.I. right now. Congress should be holding hearings with the experts and corporate leaders shaping our future. Policy makers should be outlining plans to preserve and protect the sanctity of sentient life. Sectors and industries should be identifying regulatory priorities. Community meetings, school meetings—any gathering of humans should consist of A.I. sense making. We all have a voice in this; our shared future it is at stake.